No one seems to think Romney himself actually believes that Obama's presidency is built upon a secret stash of documents. No, Romney's problem is that his embrace of Donald Trump (so repeatedly that Mitt risks being asked about group marriage again) only underscores his uncomplicated willingness to be seen with anyone who might be able to pull in an ungotten vote or two.

Most politicians are chameleons, taking on shades of the opinions and outlooks of those they mingle with: among veterans, they speak of country and duty; among teachers, they speak of education; among hedge-fund managers, they speak of rising tides lifting all boats. Romney has never been particularly good at this game of charades; he will tell a group of middle-class voters that corporations are people, too. He will brag about owning multiple Cadillacs in Michigan.

Romney's problem is that his understandable enthusiasm for mingling with different, potentially advantageous constituencies never coincides with an understanding of the constituency itself. Most skilled politicians reflect back at their audiences what the people listening already believe. Romney just shows them what he thinks of them. He's not a mirror; he's a window.

This analogy gained some painful literalness when the Romney campaign released its iPhone app, a fluffed-up camera filter that allows users to take pictures framed by campaign slogans. The app became insta-mocked for its misspelling, "Amercia", as in "A Better Amercia"! But that mistake overshadowed a more telling flaw in the entire concept: giving users the ability to put an official Mitt imprimatur (impri-Mitt-ur?) over anything. There is an innocent eagerness verging on naivety about this gambit, and it is representative of his entire campaign.

One of Romney's more fruitless assaults on the Obama presidency has been to imply that Obama does not realize how dangerous the world is, a cue that harkens back to the conservative belief that Obama is an untried commander-in-chief, a kumbaya-singing community organizer at a time when we need military might. "I wish I could tell you that the world is a safe place," he told veterans on Monday. "It's not."

But it's Romney who has been overseeing the campaign equivalent of a parent sending his kids out on a date in a car without seatbelts to look directly at an eclipse while sucking on candy impregnated with Red Dye #2. (And come home to play with Etch-a-Sketches when they're done.)

Romney seems genuinely not to understand that people are prepared to think the worst of him, and do the worst to him. His protestations to criticism almost always fall along the lines of, "Oh, come on, you don't mean to think I meant to kill the dog/fire the workers/employ the illegals." For Pete's sake, he's running for office!

Obama, on the other hand, is a case study refuting the truism that liberals' understanding of the law of unintended consequences is muddied by their conviction that motivations matter. No, Obama is coldly aware that his actions are the weights on the scales of justice – and he seems perfectly happy to put his finger on those scales as well, cheating justice in the name of national security.

In this respect, he is – and civil libertarians agree – more like Bush than the stoned flower-child the GOP seems to believe they are running against. (The most surprising thing about the revelations of Obama's adolescent drug use is that he was into a substance of such mellow effect. Leave it to the political manipulator in him to turn smoking marijuana from a group-hug experience to a competitive one.)

Of the two men, it's Mitt who seems the most uncomfortable with human emotion, and perhaps that's why he doesn't seem to have made much of a study of it. Obama is conversant with the language of the heart in the manner of someone fluent in a second language; in that way, Obama is very much a foreigner, and he has the stranger-in-a-strange land's bone-deep understanding that he is not trusted by the natives. He does not think that people will believe the best of him or cut him slack if he makes a mistake.

Obama's admissions about drug use and experimental menu items have been the bits from his autobiography we talk about the most, but the real theme of "Dreams of My Father" was difference: the feeling of not belonging that a child of two cultures feels acutely, but that is written into the history of American blacks in blood. Obama knows with some intimacy that people who look like him can't walk and eat Skittles without someone thinking the worst.

Donald Trump's request for Obama's birth certificate (or his college transcripts, for that matter) are only the most ludicrous and high-profile versions of the kind of "let me see your license" bullshit that African Americans have to put up with every day. And Romney's bland acceptance of Trump's mercenary bullying is the birthright – the license, if you will – of someone whose real privilege is never having to worry about what other people think.